


Two miles from Jerusalem

by prieta



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Afghanistan, Caves, Gen, Tony Angst, aka excuse for enforced bonding time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-10 16:07:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1161793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prieta/pseuds/prieta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Afghanistan a legacy is reborn.//</p><p>Also known as ‘that fic wherein Yinsen beats some sense into Tony’.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two miles from Jerusalem

**Author's Note:**

> I thought, "Where is the Tony-and-Yinsen-bonding-through-suffering fic?? Where are the heartfelt confessions and witty banter and seeking-solace-in-each-other-in-the-midst-of-tragedy-with-each-other fic?? I need this like burning." So I wrote it kind of.
> 
> Originally scene practice gone to plaid. Might totally rewrite it later, not 100% happy with it.

  
Two Miles from Jerusalem

\--

 

“Hit,” says Yinsen, smiling when Stark frowns in consternation but obediently moves to slide his checker into the bar. The hand that he lets hover over the board trembles faintly. It had been difficult convincing Stark to sit up, much less play a board game but Yinsen had insisted- without monitors to hook him up to there had been no other way to tell if his heart was failing him.

“You may be the first person who’s ever come this close to beating me at this,” Tony tells him, shifting slowly on his makeshift cot and grimacing. It tilts the board balanced precariously on his lap, sliding the checkers out of their points. 

“You _are_ drugged to an inch of your life,” he reminds him. 

“Yeah,” Tony smiles, a loose, sloppy tilt of his mouth. “Good stuff.” Absently his fingers reach out to push the checkers back into their places- he’s not even looking at them and barely coherent but his fingers move unerringly, hands as if acting under some predetermined ordinance. Yinsen knows that if he had the desire to check they’d be in exactly the place they were before they’d been disturbed. 

"Be glad," Yinsen tells him. "That whatever Raza gave you worked, somewhat." The plastic bag Raza had thrown at him, the yellowed and crumbling labels on the clear plastic bottles. It could have been water and not morphine, for all they would know had known.

Stark shrugs, rolls the dice between his index finger lazily, "they wouldn't let me die...Not before I finish. After that though." His smile turns faintly bitter, before it disappears.

"After that you'll be on a plane headed west." Stark snorts tiredly, in the way of a man resigned. Stark wasn’t the person Yinsen thought he’d be. For all his renown he had been expecting a cruel man—or a self-centered one at the least. Not a man who fidgeted like a boy, who possessed such a startlingly precise propensity for self-deprecation for all he was a notorious narcissist.

“Your turn,” Yinsen prompts. It takes him too long to respond. Despite Yinsen’s best efforts he is slowly slipping into the dangerous territory of sleep. It surprises Yinsen how much he would care if Stark died. He found it unsettlingly easy to like him. Yinsen hadn’t been sure if he could at first- standing over there with his chest spread out on the table under his hands he hadn’t been able to stop the shaking. Stark had been half-dead already, Yinsen remembers staring down at the hole in his chest, thinking he ought to be able to see the cold metal slab underneath him. The pale cracked edges of broken ribs lining his chest like teeth. He thought that perhaps they would kill him if he killed Stark and he remembered wishing for it with such an intense ache, like a physical presence wrapped around his chest, a vice.

“Stay awake,” Yinsen cautions, but Stark blinks at him sluggishly. The board lists to the side and slips down his spread knees. The strange light from the thing in his chest tilts, throwing his face in sharp relief. He looks oddly vulnerable, skin pale against the dark line of the neat facial hair that Yinsen had carefully scraped down for him, the dark crease between his brows a constant feature in his expression even with his face slack and languid- he’d lost weight since he got here, sapped of the vim and vigour of the celebrity lifestyle he’d carried around on television like an aura. His shallow, laboured breathing fills the dank confines of their cave.

“Keep me awake, then,” Stark murmurs, cheek lolling on his shoulders. “Tell me something.”

 “What would like to know about? I’m sorry to say I haven’t led as interesting a life as yours.”

“You said you have a family,” he tilts his gaze in Yinsen’s direction, eyes hazy and unfocused. Yinsen leans over and shakes his shoulder gently, swallowing over the sudden weight in his chest.

“I did,” he says.

He thinks of Mina. Her remains buried somewhere in Gulmira under piles of rubble. At first he hadn’t recognized the burnt-out shell of their house, had run right past it. He’d been a week too late, hadn’t had time to go looking for the body before he’d been dragged away again. Sometimes he thinks about her- the ribbon she liked to use to tie her hair back, the way she liked to drink her tea: with milk when they could get it. The sound of her soft singing slipping through the halls late at night soft as a cat’s padding steps.

“Her name was Mina. She had a beautiful voice,” he tells Stark, finally. “We—she was self-conscious of it, but when our daughter would wake up in the middle of the night she’d rock her and sing her to sleep again.”

A long moment, stretched thin. Stark closes his eyes. Swallows painfully, his throat bobbing, the air whistling out from his lungs a slow collapse. Yinsen considers telling him- just yesterday he’d dreamt of her again. He’d dreamt he’d been crawling through the skeleton of their dessicated house, running his hands frantically through the ash until he felt it- the cool slide of her hair on his palm and he’d lifted her head from the ground with bloody hands. 

“You could have killed me,” Stark says, voice hoarse. Thick with pain or grief- it had also surprised him to know that Stark was a man who could cry for strangers, even strapped to a bed with a gaping hole carved in his chest. This man who would don his crimes like the expensive suits he wore for reporters. 

“But I didn’t.” Yinsen replies.

“You should have, ” he whispers. Yinsen tightens his hands on the sheets between them. A sudden, unbidden wave of irritation rises in his throat like bile. He thinks of Mina’s dresses, the swaddling sheets they bought for their daughter before she had been born. Her bright scarves and headdresses burnt to the same ugly gray color as the rest of their house, crumbling in the wind while the men who ordered her death sleep peacefully 50 feet away. He thinks of the feel of her hair sliding through his fingers in his dream, slipping between his fingers to pool on the once-tiled floor of their kitchen.

“Do you want to die,” he asks him. Tony’s brows crease in confusion. His eyelashes flutter as he opens his eyes again.

“I-”

“What have I been doing for all these weeks, but help you escape, Stark.” Yinsen tells him, forcefully. “I’ve seen your work. The machine is, it’s brilliant. Don’t dishonor my family by—dying when you could live. By choosing not to fight when they didn’t ever have the chance to open their mouths.”

Stark shakes his head, begs, “what can I do. I’m a cripple, with a heart pieced together with missile parts. What…”

Yinsen jumps to his feet, suddenly seized by some frantic unnamed emotion. The Backgammon pieces clatter to the floor with a wince-inducing rattle.

 “Can’t you see,” he demands, gripping Stark’s thin shoulder between his own, and shaking him roughly. Stark’s face folds over in pain and he doubles up in Yinsen’s grasp, nails digging into his arms. A spot of red seeps into the thick white swath of bandages covering his sternum, tracing the visible swell of the arc reactor underneath. Yinsen thinks of standing in the cave, breath held in anticipation as Stark flipped the switch; the soft luminescence of the reactor sliding smoothly to life a miniature sun being born and Tony had just smiled, a little knowing slant of his mouth, never a moment of doubt in his mind it seemed and for the first time in three months Yinsen had thought about escape.

 _You’ve truly lived up to your name,_ he thinks, staring down at the dark head between his arms. Something bitter burns the depths of his stomach. They broke his heart but brilliant mechanic he is, he builds himself a new one out of scraps of metal— just another logistics problem for the great Tony Stark.

“What can _I_ do,” Tony repeats, head still bowed.

“You’re Tony Stark. The Da Vinci of your time,” Yinsen bites out, voice tight like he’s choking near a shout. “Do you know how long since—how long I’ve been here, before you?” Months of waiting to die. He’d begged Raza to let him see to his family’s grave but they’d laughed and kicked his ribs, like you would a mangy stray.  He’d lie at night in the tent they set up for him, the humiliation and the terror like a constant low-grade headache at the base of his skull. Driven almost to madness listening to the boots that would stomp past his head wondering with a terrible combination of fear and desperation if this was they day they’d drag his head under the water and not let him up again – he would have begged if they gave him opportunity. 

Yinsen shakes his head, hands slacking. He backs up. Tony finally raises his head and looks up at him in bewilderment. “Then,” he laughs, nearly hysterical, “here you are, concocting half-mad ideas to escape that I can’t help believe.”

 “You’ve made this legacy, this war. You can unmake it. Tony. You’re greater than you know.” _Greater than we could be_ , he thinks. “You _have to_. Understand?”

 Tony opens his mouth, closes it again. His dark eyes staring at him, too pale, too quiet, like a little kid caught in a trick yet somehow this was the man the fates had chosen, this man who would wave his hands and revolutionize industries, an American Prometheus. 

“Promise me, Stark.” Yinsen demands, “don’t waste this life others died to give you.”

Tony takes another quivering breath, hands wrapped protectively over his sternum.

“Of course,” he whispers.

“That’s it then,” Yinsen tells him, sliding off the bed. Ignoring the vice around his chest, the loud sound of his heart hammering in his ears, the waves of grief great and terrible crashing behind his eyelids a near-crippling tide. _Sometimes_ , he wants to tell Tony. _Sometimes I'll look at my hands and see her blood on them; sometimes I'll wish it was Raza's_. “I’ll change your bandages,” he says instead. Turns his back to him, feels the rustle of sheets as Tony shifts behind him, loud in the near-oppressive silence.

“Right,” he hears Tony say, shakily. “Right.”

\--

The afternoon of the funeral and Tony’s back in the workshop again. Rigging up some sort of platform on the roof- poring over diagrams and swatting irritably at the robotic hands that approaching him with what looked like bits of the Mark III. 

He doesn’t look up at Pepper’s steps, still contorted uncomfortably over a panel floor, mouth filled with screws and bolts. Pepper taps her heels on the floor, trying for patience in the wake of the funeral, then gives up. 

“Come down from there before you break your neck!” She shouts at him. His head whips up, dropping a screw or something from the corner of his jaw. 

“What are rules trying to break this time,” she ask, exasperated, as he jogs down to meet her, still shedding metal parts like a snake molting. His hair is sticking up in all directions from the helmet he’d had jammed on his head. He’s still wearing part of the suit he wore to the funeral, tie long gone but the silk of his dress shirt a rumpled mess at his elbows, stained under his arms. 

“Getting the landing bay rigged up, so I have easy come and go in the armor.” He fidgets with another screwdriver behind his back as he hops into the room. “You know what Wendy from Public said- Iron Man’s gonna need to be out and about to promote our big unveiling.” He taps at his chest under his shirt, the unsettlingly hollow sound it ominously empty, Pepper hasn’t gotten used to it yet. “Why spend billions on commercials and reports when you have living proof of palladium-decay’s effectiveness right here?”

“The tech convention comes second. When was the last time you slept,” she says, feeling resigned. After the first few weeks back, where he’d been brooding—freakishly quiet, with some distant, wigged out expression on his face. She’d woken up one day and seen the workshop door open again and he’d been standing in the middle of the shop, talking with his hands and arguing frenetically with Jarvis, just like normal- after that it was the inevitable spiral into another one of his work frenzies.

 “I don’t know why you can’t just move back the meeting—give you time to lower the accident rate, maybe you could fit some showers in your schedule?”

Tony shakes his head, vigorously. Jittering on a caffeine high like a crack addict in the throes of withdrawal— or at least she hopes it was just caffeine. “Nope. Not gonna happen. It’ll be done by this week, it will I promise. It’ll be fine. I’ll fix the gamma leakage in the second coil I know how it’s so negligible already.”

“The sooner we get this tech out the better. I had Jarvis run the data you know—the stuff I sent out to Marketing wasn’t just empty fluff. Output from a reactor four times the size of this one would be equivalent to the Grand Coulee—Pep, hot fusion would solve the entire energy-fucking-crisis.”

He leans a little closer to her as he babbles, he’s listing a little like a flag in the wind, twitchy in his hands and the corners of his mouth. The bags under his eyes are dark like bruises. Pepper frowns, disquieted. Though she doesn’t know anything more about the man than what she’d been instructed to order on the tombstone— ‘Ho Yinsen, a man greater than his time’—she knows from the way Tony says his name in his sleep he must have been responsible, somehow, for this mania in Tony. 

“Tony,” she asks, softer even as he turns away and stalks to the windows, “are you sure—the funeral was just today. Don’t you need a few days? I know he was important to you, but, ” 

“He saved me, ” Tony interrupts, waving his hand over his shoulders already checked out of the conversation. “Do you know how unreal that is? Take any other person on the streets, any fucking 3rd grader who listens to their parents talk over dinner, give them the knife and they would have killed me. But he didn’t.” 

Spinning around again, back to the wide tower window, the shadow he cuts across the floor. The blue at his chest looks like just another piece of the sky, like his heart had been punched out of him the perfect hollow circle of a cookie cutter. He spreads his hands to his sides the way he does in the suit when he’s about to take off.

“Tony-” 

“A day or two. Maybe. I’ll work out the kinks in the stabilization. Then we’ll go public. It’ll be revolutionary, Pep,” he proclaims, grin giddy and infectious, half-translucent from the glow in his chest, his palms raised in front of him as if he were in the air already. “It’ll change the world.”

 

 

\--

FIN


End file.
